Can Obama cure TV's Blitzeritis? TV creates confusion

Can Obama cure TV's Blitzeritis? TV creates mass political confusion
By BRIAN LOWRY - Variety
3/26/08

Obama's race speech proved tough for cable newsers to parse into easily digestible soundbites.

My mother is a wonderful person, and as her fourth child, I'm grateful she didn't stick to her guns and quit after three. Yet she also epitomizes a crazy-making side effect of modern TV news that consistently exalts the trivial -- a condition I've labeled Blitzeritis, or behaving like a Moran.
Ask mom about John McCain and she'll say he's too old and looks it. Barack Obama is too thin. Hillary Clinton's husband is a philanderer, Mitt Romney's wife is a very nice-looking woman, and Al Gore is a bright guy who she now wishes were president, except that kid of his keeps getting into trouble.

Hearing her recite political figures' shortcomings -- invariably fixating upon their most superficial attributes --is like listening to Goldilocks if she focused not on the porridge but the color of the bowls in which it was served.

In harboring this little tic, mom is very much in tune with the cable-news networks, which combine obsessive horserace analysis with the probing depth of Us magazine.

Anchors, correspondents and regular pundits (an increasingly in-bred menagerie) are thus decidedly ill-equipped to deal with intricate or nuanced ideas. Producers and hosts are rather preprogrammed to unleash the ideological attack dogs from both sides, then simply tear at a thing until it stops moving.

As for the fascination with the inconsequential, a Fox News panel actually spent several minutes the other day analyzing New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson's newly grown beard. If mom still looked like a cheerleader and was willing to squeeze into a questionably short skirt, she'd have fit right in.

Democratic contender Obama threw a wrench into this automated machinery with his landmark speech last week about race in America. Failing to speak in readily digestible sound bites, he temporarily flummoxed TV's chattering class, which sounded relieved to retreat to more familiar terrain -- sexual peccadilloes among politicians (the governor! A mayor! Another governor!); the campaign's who's up/who's down bookkeeping (plus or minus 4 percent); and round if arbitrary milestones (4,000 U.S. soldiers dead in Iraq) that can be pontificated upon from the customary angles by the usual suspects.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism neatly summarized the Obama coverage, saying that "perhaps the most intriguing element was watching the media culture try to deal with a speech that was so complex it defied the TV panel debate, the skills of the veteran political writer or the parameters of a 90-second nightly news segment."

It's not surprising the subsequent discussion triggered blowback even within news organizations, such as Fox News' Chris Wallace publicly scolding the channel's hosts on "Fox & Friends" -- a trio that will never be confused with Harvard's debating society -- for truncating an Obama follow-up comment to the point of distortion, accentuating the negative spin.

Then again, Fox News has consciously adopted an aggressive talk-radio-on-TV approach (and MSNBC has opportunistically moved to counter Fox), which is why this piece began by singling out anchors from CNN and "Nightline," news entities that should reasonably be expected to aim for a higher level of sobriety and don't. Their transgressions reside not in philosophical bias but the emptiness of their blustery rhetoric.

Granted, doing live TV is tantamount to flying without a net and merits some slack; still, that's no excuse for the lobotomy performed on ABC's latenight mag under a tri-anchor format including Terry Moran or the relentless banality of CNN's "The Situation Room," where Wolf Blitzer's interviews often seem to ignore the answers in his quest for urgency and volume.

Perhaps that's why Obama's speech was so bracing -- not strictly for its content but the candidate's refusal to bow to cable news conventions. Win or lose, he was almost saying, I'm going to assume the public is smarter than the general tenor of TV's political discourse would have you believe.

Whether he's ultimately rewarded for that gamble remains to be seen, but for now there's little cause for optimism, as cable news continues to exhibit a bad case of Blitzeritis. And while my mother recommends chicken soup as a magical cure-all for the body, it appears far too late to remedy the chronic shallowness that's saturated TV's soul.